George Orwell

George Orwell was the pen name for Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), who was a leading English socialist writer and journalist who exposed the evils of Stalinism in two novels published near the end of his life: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A lifelong socialist, George Orwell learned about Stalinism when he volunteered to fight the Spanish Fascist forces to keep them from overturning the democratically elected socialist government of Spain in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. Taking a bullet through his neck but surviving, Orwell was dismayed the discover that Russian support for the International Brigades was curtailed in order to stockpile arms and personnel for the coming war against Germany. Also, Soviet support for the Republican effort was contingent upon the isolation of Socialist and Anarchist militias who Stalin felt threatened communist interests in western Europe. Orwell himself was a member of the POUM, in Engish, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification.

Orwell had only ten years left in his life when he returned. During that period he and his wife adopted a baby boy, but then Orwell's wife died shortly thereafter. In those ten years Orwell wrote his famous anti-stalinst classics described above, first spending three years on the short story Animal Farm (1944), and then perhaps five years on the longer novel 1984 (1949). He died of tuberculosis the next year.